As you know if you’ve been following along (or watched too much SciFi channel four years ago), NXT is built around a series of asinine challenges that are supposed to reveal who the “best” rookies are, but mostly just make everyone look like idiotic assholes. One of the finest of these challenges is the legendary Kissing Contest, a bit so grand they did it several more times. Let me put it to you this way … if I said “WWE had a kissing contest,” what would you THINK would happen? If you said “they’d bring out someone fat and ugly and everyone would act embarrassed about having to kiss someone gross,” congratulations, you are aware of WWE’s Board of 5-Year Old Directors.

If the joke in the male kissing contest was an overweight lady with a unibrow and food on her face, what’s the joke for the Divas version? You’ve got three guesses, and two of them are “Hornswoggle.” Note: guess three would’ve been “The Great Khali.”

Here are your official With Spandex NXT season 3 kissing contest power rankings:

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5. Aksana

Aksana is excused from the kissing contest because she’s getting married IN LIKE HALF AN HOUR, so she defaults to last place. It’s interesting, though, that WWE respects the sanctity of an arranged green-card marriage and doesn’t want “was forced to kiss a rapey leprechaun” to cause problems.

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4. Maxine

Creative note: only 2 of the 5 women actually participate in the kissing contest. Again, this takes almost 15 minutes.

Maxine refuses to kiss Hornswoggle, pie-facing him and shooing him out of the ring. This becomes important later, believe it or not. Hornswoggle’s replacement is Dashing Cody Rhodes, but Maxine won’t kiss him either. She holds out her hand and makes Cody kiss it. The only place for MAXINE is ON TOP, or whatever. Somewhere in the darkness, Michael McGillicutty throws down his light beer and yells, “I RUBBED MY CROTCH ON A FAT LADY’S STOMACH AND LICKED MARINARA SAUCE OFF HER FACE AND YOU CAN’T KISS CODY RHODES?? COME ON.”

The announce team is audibly upset every time Naomi talks now, so that could explain why she was a mute dancer for the next three years.

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2. Kaitlyn

Kaitlyn gets a raw deal here, having to kiss two people AND having Striker make creepy “heh, s’not like you’ve never kissed two people in the same night” jokes. On top of that, she kisses Hornswoggle about 30 seconds after Striker’s clarified that Horny must judge the winner based on who makes him feel the most “happy inside.” Yes folks, it’s the BONER INDUCEMENT CHALLENGE.

She’s the only one who gets the AAAHH AAAHHH forced kiss from Hornswoggle, so by the time Cody shows up and they restart the contest, she’s already under the bus. Ah well, at least she didn’t have to push anybody around in a wheelbarrow.

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Best: 1. AJ, And The Creation Of A Character Trait

The final contestant is AJ, who gets put over has having “never kissed a boy.” So keeping it kayfabe, this is AJ’s first kiss … this is important, as like a year and a half of the upswing of her career was based around her kissing boys. She makes out with Primo later in this season, and that eventually turns into Daniel Bryan, CM Punk, Kane, John Cena and Dolph Ziggler. And, uh, Paige, kind of.

It goes like you imagine it might; AJ is nervous, but decides to “go for it” and jumps Cody’s bones, knocking him down. She gets up and acts erratically, which plays here as “geeky nervous” but in retrospect is perfectly in tune with her “crazy” gag. She’s a smart, confident, playful woman who is driven to instant madness by confrontational emotions like love and betrayal. Cody chooses her as the winner, because those kinds of women are always the best kissers. Every kiss should come with a tiny bit of madness.

Note: This is not the last of tonight’s kissing, because “love is in the air.” It’s the same airborne disease that caused Stephanie McMahon to make out with a guy in a Vince McMahon Halloween costume, so keep that in mind.

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Best: Josh Mathews’s Sick Burn

Because he’s terrible at jokes, Michael Cole (a man who is in a suit 99% of the times we see him) wears a tuxedo t-shirt for Goldust and Aksana’s wedding. He chuckles and asks Josh what he thinks about it. Josh’s response?

“You look like Jerry The King Lawler.”

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Worst: Primo’s Pick-Up Lines

After the kissing contest, Primo and AJ walk down a hallway with a cameraman a few steps ahead of them, walking backwards. Primo’s jealous that AJ kissed Cody, so he hits her with his best line: “AJ. You look. REAL GOOD.” Hey Primo. Your mic skills are. Real bad.

Anyway, AJ FALLS FOR IT because she’s in a fit of lust rage or whatever and says she wants to tell Primo something in private. This leads to a series of gags of them opening doors and finding wacky things behind them, the first of which is ‘The American Dream’ Dusty Rhodes about to get it on (if you will) with Michael Cole’s dates for the wedding, The Bella Twins. Dusty tells them there’s no room at the inn and does a Ricky Ricardo impression, because Mexicans. Great job, everybody.

Don’t worry though, they find something way worse behind the second door.

Worst: LOVE IS IN THE AIR, FOLKS

Behind door number two, Maxine is forcing sex on a mute man-child. You see, the joke is that she didn’t want to kiss him in the kissing contest because he was kissing everybody ELSE. Jealousy and all that. The context here is weird, because when AJ and Primo open the door, Hornswoggle’s flailing his arms around like he’s upset. The second they stop and Maxine starts yelling “NO IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK,” Hornswoggle’s laughing and giving the thumbs up. Are … are they roleplaying? Do they sexually roleplay bad NXT contest segments??

This is the one I’ve been waiting for, the one that represents my “ironic” love of NXT S3 more than any other. No wrestling, embarrassing contests, stupid soap opera stories, I think I described NXT S3 but i might have described RAW anyway.

* Real Talk: Dashing Cody Rhodes is the best Cody Rhodes character
* I wish JR was there to yell “SPEAR!” when AJ tackled Cody Rhodes
* Dusty Rhodes is still the swavest dude
* Why are Vickie and The Shield the only people in WWE history who’ve ever ran to the back after seeing a backstage segment on the Titantron? Was she their higher power?
* I like that Kaitlyn didn’t accidentaly shove cake at Vickie’s face, she full on plowed her with it.
* Rhodes wedding with DiBiase intrusions? This would be awesome if Ted Jr. had any charisma.
* Nooooo, Maxine! Why do I have to live her loss again?!

Nikki: We were backstage with Dusty Rhodes. After we got caught by Primo and AJ, Brie brought out a polka dot outfit and made me change into it. Then she put a tiara on my head and told Dusty that I was his new precious Sapphire. I’ve never told anyone that before…

Dashing Cody Rhodes was absolutely GOLD!
Ah the first ever NXT wedding Goldust and Aksana, I’ll take my word back when I said that the Halloween NXT was the memorable episode and give that award to this episode instead. I liked Goldust’s feud with Ted DiBiase Jr.
Maxine is tremendous, her work with Derrick Bateman and Johnny Curtis on NXT Redemption was top notch, unfortunately only a very few people were watching that show including myself.

Right? One bit only works if the camera doesn’t exist and it’s just “magical window into the backstage” that it sort of usually is, and the other bit only works if it’s “while we’re backstage people are filming us.” It takes the fundamental nature of the show and smashes it against it’s own fourth wall.

So far, my favorite part of the whole season is Dashing Cody Rhodes during that entire kissing contest. Specifically all the prep work he did before kissing each girl, all leading up to him pulling a goddamn NAIL FILE on AJ and just lightly rubbing it across her nails. Standing ovation.

How amazing would a Dashing Cody Rhodes/Tyler Breeze tag team or feud be? I miss that Cody so much, even though he’s been pretty killer in almost everything else he’s done.

The logic of using the nail file on AJ is fantastic as well. She’s the “geeky” one who’s never kissed a boy, of course her nails wouldn’t be perfectly filed. I choose to believe that’s what Cody was going for and clap for that magnificent SOB.